Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical Reconstruction (paperback) by Madhav M. Deshpande (author), Murray B. Emeneau (foreword)

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Madhav M. Deshpande (author), Murray B. Emeneau (foreword)

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Madhav M. Deshpande (author), Murray B. Emeneau (foreword)

Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical Reconstruction (paperback)
Authors:	Madhav M. Deshpande (author), Murray B. Emeneau (foreword)
ISBN:	9789376540310
Binding:	Paperback
Year:	2027
Pages:	178
Size:	16 x 24 cm
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About the Book

Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical Reconstruction is a major study of the historical relationship between language, society, religion, and cultural authority in India. Madhav M. Deshpande examines how languages acquire differing degrees of prestige, legitimacy, and social value, and how such attitudes develop within changing historical circumstances rather than remaining fixed or self-evident.

Drawing upon Sanskrit, Prakrit, and vernacular traditions, the book explores the complex hierarchies through which languages have been understood and evaluated in Indian intellectual and cultural history. It considers Brahmanical attitudes towards linguistic purity, the place of Sanskrit and the literary Prakrits, the treatment of linguistic difference within literary and religious traditions, and the ways communities responded to established structures of linguistic authority.

Deshpande shows that linguistic attitudes cannot be separated from the religious, political, literary, and social environments in which they arise. Ideas about correct and incorrect speech, refined and non-refined language, sacred and secular usage, and prestigious and subordinate linguistic forms reflect larger contests over authority, community, learning, and cultural status.

Combining philological scholarship with historical sociolinguistic analysis, the book offers an illuminating account of how language both reflects and participates in social and intellectual change. It remains an important contribution to the study of Sanskrit and Prakrit, historical sociolinguistics, Indian linguistic thought, and the cultural history of language in South Asia.

About the Authors

Madhav M. Deshpande

Madhav M. Deshpande is Professor Emeritus of South Asian Literature and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where he taught for several decades in Asian Languages and Cultures and Linguistics. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. The University of Michigan lists his principal fields as the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, historical linguistics, Sanskrit phonetics, Indo-Aryan linguistics, and the sociolinguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit.

Trained in both traditional and modern Sanskrit scholarship in Pune, he received his doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and joined the University of Michigan the same year. Over the course of a distinguished scholarly career, his research has ranged across Pāṇinian grammar, the historical and sociolinguistic development of Indo-Aryan languages, Sanskrit intellectual traditions, and the religious and philosophical traditions of India.

He is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 150 research papers. Among his best-known works are Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: A Historical Reconstruction; Evolution of Syntactic Theory in Sanskrit Grammar: Syntax of the Sanskrit Infinitive -tumUN; The Meaning of Nouns: Semantic Theory in Classical and Medieval India; Critical Studies in Indian Grammarians I: The Theory of Homogeneity; and Samskrta-Subodhini: A Sanskrit Primer. His scholarship is distinguished by its close engagement with the Indian grammatical tradition alongside historical linguistics and sociolinguistic analysis.

Murray B. Emeneau

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